Tintri has been selling storage arrays for almost four years now and we have seen them go from a single model offering to the current three models. Along the way they have added features and supported additional hypervisors. Today Tintri is blowing the top off of things and announcing their biggest update since coming out of stealth. If you would like to learn more about Tintri you can read the in-depth Tintri review over at Data Center Zombie.

The T800 Series

As part of todays release is a new set of storage arrays from Tintri. The T800 series is a line of bigger, faster and more VM storage arrays. I like the name T800, kind of reminds me of another T800 that kicked a lot of butt in the Terminator movies. The T800 series is utilizing Tintri’s new compression feature on the capacity tier to offer greater effect capacity. The compression is all done in-line and the values are based on a modest 2:1 sample. Every model in the 800 series offers more flash than the pervious 600 series of arrays.

T820 – 23TB effective capacity and 750 VMs

T850 – 66TB effective capacity and 2000 VMs

T880 – 100TB effective capacity and 3500 VMs

Tintri OS 3.1 Updates

Along with the new hardware todays announcement covers the new Tintri OS version 3.1. This update brings a number of new features along with bringing support for the new array models. The latest OS update is applicable to both the 600 and 800 series of storage arrays.

SRM support – Tintri was already offering storage based replication on a per-VM basis which was a great feature. The new update brings support for VMware SRM to allow for the automated fail-over and recovery of VMs.

Encryption – Another new feature is data at rest encryption on all T800 and T600 series storage arrays. Tintri is using self encrypting drives in these arrays and OS version 3.1 brings internal key management. At some future date we will see Tintri offer support for external key management options.

Automation updates – In the previous OS update Tintri released their PowerShell support as the first step in allowing admins and applications to automate the storage platform. With todays news they are announcing the brand new REST API interface. This will allow customers to further build automation and interface with the storage in new ways.

Hyper-V supporting is coming soon. In my briefing with the Tintri product team they mentioned that Hyper-V support is expect to be released in late Q4 of this year.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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I have written about CloudPhysics in the past and I think the tool has some cool features. They continue to add features and think up new ways to use all the data they collect about your data center and compare to others.

There are some scary things that can hide in your data center. The infographic below was pretty cool. The part that scared me was 22% of vSphere 5.5 hosts are still un-protected for SSL Heartbleed vulnerability. Take some time if you have not already and get to know the CloudPhysics offering.

You can read more about the features at the official CloudPhysics blog post here.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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On the first day of VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, CloudPhysics kicks the conference off with a big announcement. The patform is receiving another round of new features that will blow your socks off. I’ve followed CloudPhysics closely over the past couple of years since they announced themselves to the world. Given the way they built their hosted offering I immediately began to dream of what might be possible. Some of the new features are exactly what I dreamed of and others are just more awesomeness that they dreamed up.

Global Data Set

CloudPhysics has been collecting data from every environment that installs their observer appliance. The observer is necessary to use the CloudPhysics offering, this is how data is collected and uploaded. The tools then crunch the data, for a lack of better description. You are able to use your data for reports and monitoring. CloudPhsyics also has been collecting two years worth of annonomized customer data that is now like the hive mind.

No one else has this level of information about virtualization. Oh the things that could be done with this, well I’m glad to say that they now have enough unique data that represents unique environments of all sizes that can be used for comparison purposes. I can’t tell you how cool this is going to be.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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A new company is coming out of stealth today and is called Platform9. Platform9 is the creation of several of the earlier engineers from VMware. This team had their hands in creating the great features that enterprises use everyday. Their new project is set to bring OpenStack features and functionality to Enterprises without all the challenges.

Platform9 is a SaaS based management platform that offers OpenStack API compatibility. The product is built on OpenStack with custom management interfaces. The team is starting out with KVM support out of the gate and VMware vSphere coming later this year. Think of it as a cloud management layer in the cloud to manage your on-site resources.

Below is a few highlights from the press release that can be read in full here.

Platform9 is the easiest way for enterprises to implement a private cloud, with intelligent, self-service provisioning of workloads onto their computing infrastructure.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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With the recent update of the entire EUC suite from VMware I thought it would be a good time to revisit the install process for Horizon 6. Yes it used to be called VMware View, then it was Horizon View and now it’s just Horizon 6. Why? well because it is no longer just VDI. Horizon 6 is now a product that offers VDI, Application presentation and Hosted shared desktops both via RDS from Microsoft. This is a big advancement by VMware and welcomed by anyone that cares about EUC.

This is what drove me to revisit the install of Horizon. With these added features there will be many changes and I wanted to build a comprehensive post series that covers what it takes to get the product up and running.

Installing the first connection server

Step 1: You will need to provision a Windows Server 2008R2 or 2012R2 server to install Horizon 6 onto. The product will definitely not install on the non-R2 versions of these, this comes from someone picking the wrong VM template the first time.

Step 2: If you have not already then you need to download the install files for Horizon 6. For this walkthrough you will only need the connection broker install file, but I would recommend you grab all the files that you will need for your build. This includes the View agents, GPO files and others.

Step 3: Copy the installer to the server that you will be using for the install and run the installer. The app starts with a familiar look the product version is shown in the lower left of the window letting us know its version 6.0.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design